by Lucy Monroe
And he was the only man with the real power to hurt her. The others had caused her embarrassment, but Luciano’s rejection had cut deeply into her heart and left her bleeding.
“I did not hurt you.”
How could he say that? “You pushed me away like I was diseased! You left! You didn’t come back. I don’t know what you are up to now, but I’m not such a believer in fairy tales that I would entertain for one minute the thought I could be someone special in your life.”
A charming smile tilted his lips. “So you see me as Prince Charming and yourself the frog? I assure you, I am more than willing to kiss you and turn you into a princess.”
His mockery was the limit. Her eyes burned with tears she did not want to shed in front of him. “Leave me alone, Luciano. Just leave me alone.” She spun on her heel and this time she made her escape good. She made it to the bathroom and slammed the door only to discover it had no lock.
She looked around wildly, but there was no escape.
She stared at the knob and willed it to stay immobile accepting she had absolutely no telekinetic powers when the knob turned.
The door opened and Luciano filled the doorway, his dark gaze probing her with tactile intensity. “You have taken me wrong, bella mia. It was a little joke. A poor one, but only a joke.”
“Get out,” she said, her voice breaking on a sob, “I want to freshen up.”
He shook his head. “I cannot leave you in such distress.”
“Why not? You did six months ago.”
“But I did not know so at the time.”
“Are you trying to say that if you had, you would have stayed? That you would not have rejected me so publicly and treated me like the kiss meant nothing to you?”
His face was tight with frustration, but he did not answer. Probably because a truthful answer would put him even further in the wrong.
“I didn’t think so,” she said, sounding every bit as cynical as the women who had mocked her at the party.
In a move that shocked her, he reached out and pulled her to him. “That is in the past. This is now. We begin from here, cara.”
She hated her treacherous body that longed to melt against him. “I’m not up to your speed.” Miserably aware that it was too true, she tried to pull away. “I belong with someone like David.”
She stared in mesmerized fascination as his rage went nuclear. “You belong with me,” he said with lethal intensity. Then his mouth crashed down on hers.
She thought the New Year’s Eve kiss had been hot, but it was nothing like this. Nothing.
Luciano was branding her with his mouth. There was no other way to describe how his lips molded her own, the way his tongue forced entry into her too willing mouth. He tasted the same and yet different. No champagne to dilute the impact of the flavor that was uniquely him.
Hard masculine hands clamped to her waist and lifted. She landed plastered from lips to toe-tips against the ungiving contours of an aroused male body. He aligned her with him so that the evidence of his arousal was pressed into the apex of her thighs. Sliding one hand to her bottom, he manipulated her so that his hardness teased the sensitive flesh of her femininity right through the layers of her clothes.
She’d never known anything so intimate in her life.
She tried to put some distance between them, but she had no leverage with her feet completely off the floor. His hold was too firm to wiggle out of his arms and her efforts in that direction only increased the strange sensations arcing through her from the friction at the juncture of her thighs.
He wrapped his arm around the small of her back and pressed her firmly against him while increasing the intimacy of their kiss. And she melted. Just like she’d done before. Unlike before, however, there was no voice to interrupt and Luciano did not pull away. The urgency in his kiss grew along with the rising passion in her.
She became aware of his hand on her thigh, under her dress. How had it gotten there? She should protest, but that would mean breaking the kiss. Besides, his hand on her bare skin felt good. Too good to fight. Knowing fingers burned a trail of erotic caresses up the unprotected skin of her leg until they reached her bottom. He cupped her there and his mouth swallowed the sound of her shock.
Feelings so intense they frightened her coursed through her every nerve ending.
She ached to touch him. She ached for more of his touch. She lost all sense of self-preservation in the face of such overwhelming pleasure and ran her hands over his face, his shoulders, his neck, everywhere she could reach from her position locked against him.
He groaned and moved.
She realized he’d backed up to lean against the vanity when one of her feet bumped the cabinet. He pressed her legs apart and over his thighs, pushing the hard ridge of his arousal into impossibly intimate contact with her body. She didn’t have time to contemplate this because suddenly his hand was inside the silk of her panties, touching the naked flesh of her bottom. Goose bumps flashed over her flesh, accompanied by involuntary shivers that had nothing to do with being cold.
In fact, she’d never been so hot in all her life.
That devastating hand went lower to the underside of her bottom. Sliding centimeters to the left, fingers stealthily found her most intimate flesh from an unexpected direction and this time even his mouth covering hers could not stifle the shriek of shock at contact.
The feel of a man’s finger pressing into flesh that had never known anyone’s touch before was so alien that it shocked her out of the sensual reverie she’d sunk into with his kiss. She squirmed, trying to get away from that intimate touch, but that caused an amazing friction between Luciano’s excited male flesh and her sweetest spot.
His big body shuddered.
She tore her mouth from his. “Luciano. Please!”
He said something in Italian and started kissing her neck, using his tongue and teeth in a form of erotic teasing that made her squirm even more, but with pleasure this time, not shock.
His head lifted and dark eyes burned her with their sensual force. “You belong to me, bella mia. Admit it.”
She couldn’t deny a truth she’d known somewhere in her heart since she was eighteen years old. “Yes, Luciano, yes.” When had she not?
“Cara!” His mouth rocked back over hers in another soul-shaking kiss.
It went on and on and she lost all touch with reality. She could feel only his body beneath hers. She could taste only his mouth. She could smell only his scent. She could hear nothing but their joined heartbeats and a ringing in her ears.
He groaned, breaking his mouth away from hers. It was the sound of a man facing Purdah when Heaven had been within his grasp.
Her head was too heavy for her neck and it dropped forward into the hollow of his neck.
A moment later a discreet cough sounded from the doorway to the guest room. “Signor di Valerio.”
“Si?” Luciano’s voice sounded strained.
“É la vostra madre.”
It is your mother. The simple Italian phrase penetrated her brain through the fog of arousal still blunting her thinking process.
He said something that sounded suspiciously like a swearword. “I must take the call, piccola mia.”
She made a halfhearted attempt at a nod, still too enervated to speak.
He slowly withdrew his hand from intimate contact with her body as if it pained him to do so. She buried her face against him until he gently set her away from him. She kept her eyes fixed on the floor. How could she have made the same mistake twice? She hadn’t just let him kiss her, she’d responded with all the wantonness of a woman who routinely shared her body with men. She didn’t even know she was capable of that level of abandon to the physical.
It both scared and shamed her.
“Look at me, Hope.”
She shook her head. The memory of the way she had allowed him to touch her and where she had let him touch her was sending arrows of mortification into her conscience with bull’s-eye
accuracy.
“You have nothing to be guilty over.”
That was easy for him to say. He was just fruit tasting. She’d never done any of this before. “You would say that,” she accused. “You’ve probably seduced enough women to populate a small town.”
His laughter brought her head snapping up as nothing else could have.
She glared at him. “Don’t you laugh at me, Luciano di Valerio.”
He put his hands out in a gesture of surrender. “I am not the rogue you think me and I was not trying to seduce you.”
“Right.” What the heck had he been doing then, practicing his technique?
He brushed her hair behind her ear in a tender gesture that made her treacherous heart melt. “You belong to me as no woman has. Do not regret the passion the good God has given us as a gift.”
He didn’t mean it the way it sounded. He couldn’t. He was implying a special relationship. After New Year’s Eve and how easily he had turned away and stayed away, she could not afford to let herself read too much into his words.
“You have to answer the phone. You mustn’t keep your mother waiting.” Hope wanted time to regroup her defenses.
He looked at her as if contemplating saying something more, but in the end, he said only, “I will be with you as quickly as I can,” before turning to leave.
Hope availed herself of the toiletries in the well-stocked guest bathroom and tried to ignore the fact they had probably been put there for the convenience of his women friends. Like her. How much importance could she put on his avowal she was different? Her supposed difference could stem entirely from the fact that she was a virgin, undoubtedly a rare experience in the life of a male who dated such sophisticated women.
Luciano stopped a few feet from where Hope sat surrounded by the lush greenery and night-blooming flowers in his terrace garden. Strings of small white lights illuminated the dining area giving Hope, with her burnished curls and elfin features, the appearance of a fairy in her element.
Something untamed twisted inside him at the thought she could disappear from his life like the fey wood creature she resembled, leaving nothing behind but his unsatisfied and unabated arousal. If he had been shocked by the deliciousness of her response on New Year’s Eve, he was poleaxed by the living flame he’d held in his arms tonight.
He wanted her.
She wanted him too, but she didn’t trust him.
Anger surfaced to mix with the desire simmering inside him as he considered her reasons for feeling the way she did. She’d been savaged by her grandfather’s guests after Luciano had left the party. His clumsy response to the unexpected carnality of their kiss had been read as a repudiation of her advances, when she had made no advances at all.
How had that blonde thought she would get away with spreading such lies? Had she thought they would never reach his ears, or that he would not care? She would learn to regret the mistaken assumption. Luciano di Valerio did not tolerate being the subject of a tissue of lies. More importantly, Hope was his now and he protected his own.
His hands curled at his sides and atavistic anticipation curled through him at the thought of dealing with the two men who had propositioned her. They would repent treating an innocent, shy creature with such a lack of respect.
There was a certain amount of gratification in knowing that the marriage would redress the wrong he had done her. His pride still balked at submitting to her grandfather’s blackmail, but Luciano could not deny he owed Hope for the humiliation she had suffered at his unwitting hands. Their marriage would even the scales, a very important issue for this Sicilian man.
Si, and there was again no denying that their marriage bed would be a satisfying one. Even now, he wanted to go over there and lift her from the chair, carry her to his bed and finish what they had begun earlier.
Hope felt a prickling sensation on the back of her neck and turned in her chair. Luciano stood a few feet away, a look in his eyes that made the fine hairs on her body stand up. In an instant of primal awareness she could not anticipate or block, all the composure and self-control she had managed to gather around herself in his absence dissipated with the ease of water on an Arizona highway.
“I am sorry to have left you so long.” He came toward her, the muscles in his thighs flexing under the perfectly tailored Italian suit he was wearing.
Did the guy ever wear jeans? Probably not and most likely her heart couldn’t stand the sight of him in the tight-fitting denim anyway.
“Don’t worry about it. I’ve been enjoying the view. It’s incredible up here.”
Luciano’s terrace covered the entire portion of the top story of the Valerio building not occupied by his or the company apartments. Someone had turned it into a garden, giving the impression of being in an enchanted bower high above the streets of Athens. The view over the wall was spectacular. The moment she’d seen it she’d been glad she came with Luciano, if only for the opportunity to spend her final evening in Greece in such magical surroundings.
He sat down in the chair opposite hers. No sooner than he had done and a drink was placed in front of him by a discreet servant. The first course was served moments later. They were eating their main course, a meatless moussaka when she realized the entire meal had been vegetarian.
“You remembered I don’t care to eat meat.” It shocked her. She’d lived with her grandfather since she was five years old and he still couldn’t remember that about her. And if he had remembered, he would never have catered to her desires.
“It is not such a big thing.” His shoulders moved in a typical throw away gesture. “But tell me, does it bother you to be at the table when others eat it?”
“No, but I don’t look too closely at their plates either,” she admitted ruefully.
He seemed pleased by that, though she could not imagine what it had to do with him. Their conversation flowed, Luciano asking her questions about her life in Boston and answering her questions about his life in Sicily.
“So, what are you doing in Athens, or is it top-secret business stuff?” She was used to her grandfather keeping tight lips about many areas of his life.
“I make frequent trips to my headquarters here and elsewhere.”
He was as driven as her grandfather. “Do you ever take time off to relax?”
His smile sent sensations quivering through her. “I am relaxing now, with you.”
“But even this,” she indicated their almost finished dinners, “is prompted by your business interests.”
“I assure you, business has not been in the forefront of my mind since I spied you walking back toward your tour bus laughing with your companion, your hand in his.” His voice had taken on the hardness of tempered steel.
She didn’t want a reenactment of their earlier argument, so she opted not to reply to his comment. She chose instead, to change the subject. “How is your mother? Your sister is twenty now, isn’t she? Is she dating anyone special?”
For a moment he actually looked bemused. “You know a great deal about me.”
“It is inevitable after a five-year acquaintanceship.” Or rather five years of infatuation, she thought with some sadness.
“My mother is fine.” He laid his fork down and leaned back against his chair. “She is pressing me to marry soon.”
An irrational sense of loss suffused her at his words—irrational because you could not lose what you had never had. He would oblige his mother, she was sure. At thirty, Luciano was of an age for a Sicilian male to start making babies. The thought of another woman big with his child was enough to destroy what remained of her appetite.
“And your sister?” she asked, pushing away her half-finished plate, trying not to dwell on the prospect of him marrying soon.
Warm indulgence lit his almost black eyes. “Martina is enjoying university too much to allow any one male to seriously engage her interest.”
“You allowed her to attend university in America, didn’t you?” She could remember discussing
the merits of different colleges with him a couple of years previously at one of her grandfather’s business dinners.
“Si. She enjoys it very much. Mamma worries she will not wish to return to a traditional life in Sicily though.”
Hope had nothing to say in reply to that. She had no experience of daughters and mothers. Hers had died when she was much too young.
“It is understandable,” Luciano brooded. “Life in Sicily is still very traditional in some ways. Mamma has never worn a pair of trousers in her whole life. If you were seen holding hands with your young blond friend in the small village in the country outside Palermo where I grew up, an engagement announcement might be expected.”
Why did he keep harping on that? It had been totally innocent, unlike the kiss they had shared not too long ago. “David is from Texas,” she tried to explain. “He’s very affectionate, but he doesn’t mean anything by it.”
His brows rose in mockery. “This is why he invited you back to his room.”
Oh, dear. Luciano was back to looking dangerous. “He’s never done that before. He was just reacting to your arrogant claim on me. It’s a guy thing, I guess.”
“Are you truly so naive you do not realize this man wants you?”
“I’m not naive.” Introverted did not equal stupid.
His dark eyes narrowed. “Your inexperience of men and their ways shows in your foolish belief that the touches of a man who pays you particular attention mean nothing.”
He didn’t need to rub in how gauche she must appear in comparison to his usual date. So, she seemed a fool to him. She must be to have allowed herself to enjoy his kisses and conversation when he thought so little of her. “If you’re finished insulting me, I’d like to go back to my hotel now.”
“We have not yet had dessert.”
“I’m not hungry.” She indicated her unfinished dinner. “And we have an early start tomorrow.”
